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Is Grokking a Computational Glass Relaxation?

Understanding neural network's (NN) generalizability remains a central question in deep learning research. The special phenomenon of grokking, where NNs abruptly generalize long after the training performance reaches a near-perfect level, offers a unique window to investigate the underlying mechanisms of NNs' generalizability. Here we propose an interpretation for grokking by framing it as a computational glass relaxation: viewing NNs as a physical system where parameters are the degrees of freedom and train loss is the system energy, we find memorization process resembles a rapid cooling of liquid into non-equilibrium glassy state at low temperature and the later generalization is like a slow relaxation towards a more stable configuration. This mapping enables us to sample NNs' Boltzmann entropy (states of density) landscape as a function of training loss and test accuracy. Our experiments in transformers on arithmetic tasks suggests that there is NO entropy barrier in the memorization-to-generalization transition of grokking, challenging previous theory that defines grokking as a first-order phase transition. We identify a high-entropy advantage under grokking, an extension of prior work linking entropy to generalizability but much more significant. Inspired by grokking's far-from-equilibrium nature, we develop a toy optimizer WanD based on Wang-landau molecular dynamics, which can eliminate grokking without any constraints and find high-norm generalizing solutions. This provides strictly-defined counterexamples to theory attributing grokking solely to weight norm evolution towards the Goldilocks zone and also suggests new potential ways for optimizer design.

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